13 ms·

Learnlatex.org: A place to learn LaTeX online

283 points by JohnHammersley 6y ago

hatmatrix 6y ago
Not many really talking about the linked resource here but it looks quite beautiful (especially the font). Short for what it is, but could be useful to beginners. I find Overleaf pages also to provide good resources on LaTeX.
alanbernstein 6y ago
I've used latex on and off over the years, I can write complicated math expressions off the top of my head pretty easily. For document formatting and package use, however, I need to look up syntax and examples every time. Where can I learn the how all the messy syntax of latex (aside from the math notation itself) is supposed to work? Or should I just stop trying, because it's a lovecraftian tangle that will drive me insane?
tffgg 6y ago
I know it's unrealistic, but I wish someone would reinvent Latex. I don't really want anyone to learn it. It's sad it seems kind of the best tools for advanced use out there...
- nsajko 6y ago
  The reinvention is called ConTeXt.
- flenserboy 6y ago
  It's not difficult to learn at a base level. The real difficulty in learning LaTeX is becoming comfortable with handing the keys over when it comes to presentation — WYSIWYG grabs people easily, and, once taken in, it is tremendously difficult to break them of their urge to fiddle with things. In many ways it is good that it takes some doing to do more than the basics — nice output for basic documents is almost a guarantee.
  - noisy_boy 6y ago
    I second that. I was able to re-write my CV which was in Word to LaTeX in about 3 hours with help of online resources (no prior LaTeX experience). The output is high-quality, consistent and looks professional. I didn't get into a lot of advanced stuff - just defined a few "newcolumntype"/"newcommand" and used them everywhere but that freed me from formatting worries and let me focus on the content.
  - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
    On the other hand less common features are often so difficult to learn. For me the worst is tikz. I know it’s not exactly latex. But I wished it was easier to use. The output is so good, but it’s so damn hard to learn.
    - tombert 6y ago
      Tikz was so frustrating that I ended up drawing my stuff in an SVG editor and importing a high-resolution export from there. I know it's not as cool or scalable as a proper Tikz diagram, but if you have any value on your time, then I just do not think that Tikz gives you enough to be worth it, at least for relatively simple drawings.
    - diffeomorphism 6y ago
      Having something like ktikz (or qtikz) helps: https://github.com/fhackenberger/ktikz https://github.com/fhackenberger/ktikz However, it is not quite as helpful as latexdraw was for pstricks. That said, I am not sure how much of that difficulty is due to tools lacking and how much is due to "describe vector graphics as code" being a hard problem.
    - hanche 6y ago
      What – you did not enjoy reading the 1200+ page manual? But yes, I know what you mean. I use the cargo cult method for writing TikZ code myself. Look for examples of people doing something similar, then poke at the code until it does what I want. I am slowly developing some glimmer of understanding, though. I figure in another 100 years' time, I'll be a TikZ wizard at this rate.
- chungy 6y ago
  LyX is an excellent WYSIWYM GUI for it.
  - xorcist 6y ago
    This should probably be the first option for anyone who wants to produce a LaTeX document without learning the language, for some reason. It has support for bibtex, drawings, and equations.
- coliveira 6y ago
  Reinventing LaTeX can be done. The huge problem is to reinvent the ecosystem of packages. This would take several years, if not decades.
- GiovanniP 6y ago
  Take a look at TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org http://www.texmacs.org) (does not share code with TeX, only the name recalls it!). It is at the same time structured and WYSIWYG (having accessible text source), completely programmable (user-defined native macros and Scheme) and has a high quality typography (includes a global page-breaking algorithm). There is a helpful mailing list (info at http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/ml.en.html http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/ml.en.html) and a forum (http://forum.texmacs.cn/ http://forum.texmacs.cn/).
  - xvilka 6y ago
    Problem with TeXmacs that they stuck with the old technology too - they use[1] ancient Guile and that prevents them to use JIT and in turn prevents[2] distributions to update Guile itself. [1] https://github.com/texmacs/devel/issues/9 https://github.com/texmacs/devel/issues/9 [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1828124 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1828124
    - GiovanniP 6y ago
      I agree that some communication from the TeXmacs developers to the Fedora ones would be helpful (I documented myself, Fedora is using Guile 2 and still supporting 1.8 with a compatibility package). (More about the Scheme in TeXmacs later). Said this, I think the angle from which you are looking at the software is too narrow. A better angle is to look at the realized potential of the TeXmacs document preparation system: it does everything one could wish for. With "everything" I am exaggerating a little :-) More in detail (I refer to [1] for a complete discussion): 1) It makes structured editing possible (and that is its main mode of operation). So if you want to mark your text with "semantic" markup you can do that, and in fact that is what using the software leads you to do. 2) It is controllable via programs 3) It has advanced typography (including mathematical formulae at the necessary level for professional mathematicians, as far as I can see), and it is pleasant and easy to work with: you can concentrate on writing, letting the program take care of the visual appearance and you do not need to interpret the sources while you are editing, to figure out where is the text that you want to edit 4) It has user-definable keyboard shortcuts that further help entering structured text ... and I feel it is enough for a short list of the features. Back to Scheme. The development team is debating on which Scheme to use for the future of TeXmacs, and the debate is taking time. Here are some experiments [2],[3]. The current software (with Guile 1.8) works smoothly, with full functionality. For Linux installation, I chose the static binary they provide ... because on Ubuntu I don't have Guile 1.8 ;-) [1] http://cahiers.gutenberg.eu.org/cg-bin/article/CG_2001___39-40_39_0.pdf http://cahiers.gutenberg.eu.org/cg-bin/article/CG_2001___39-... [2] https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3 https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3 [3] https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/s7 https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/s7
- naringas 6y ago
  there was a project but it seems abandoned https://github.com/patoline/patoline https://github.com/patoline/patoline
nsajko 6y ago
Fun fact: about 20 years ago, LaTeX developers were lamenting the stagnation of LaTeX and LaTeX being surpassed on a technical level by its new competitor (in the TeX world), ConTeXt. Since then LaTeX has basically kept on stagnating in the name of backwards compatibility, while ConTeXt keeps on progressing; it already broke backwards compatibility several times (it's latest implementation is called LMTX). But the inertia is so powerful that nobody except TeX geeks even knows what ConTeXt is. How does that happen? Sidenote: it's not just about ConTeXt, even LuaTeX, the latest (but not new anymore) implementation of TeX in general, is being ignored by scientific publishers. Meanwhile, ConTeXt is mostly used for demanding typesetting of books. And, BTW, using ConTeXt (or LuaTeX) doesn't even necessarily mean writing TeX anymore, it's possible to drive the engines through the Lua C API, or with XML, etc. ConTeXt links: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt Mailing list: https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
- auggierose 6y ago
  Who is writing LaTeX? Mathematicians. They don't really care about the technical level of its implementation, and they surely don't care that you "don't necessarily write TeX anymore", actually, that's a negative for them.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    Scientists use TeX for writing papers that they can submit to journals. As I already said, the journals don't accept ConTeXt. So of course mathematicians will rarely use ConTeXt. > care about the technical level of its implementation It's not about the implementation, it's about the interface.
    - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
      Some journals accept Tex files? I’m surprised. SIAM (applied math) does not for instance. I don’t think IEEE does. Do Math journal accept tex files directly? Arxiv does of course, most notably. But it’s not a journal.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brian_herman 6y ago
I used this in school it is great!
Hydraulix989 6y ago
Why do the lessons only have code but not the rendered results? It's difficult to follow along if you don't know what the code is actually doing...
- codetrotter 6y ago
  Press the “LaTeX online” button under a code snippet to see the rendered result. PS: Do you have JS enabled?
ubavic 6y ago
I use some form of TeX (LaTeX or XeTeX) almost daily, and I often think about the future of (La)TeX and potential replacements. I think that we desperately need some modern language for document preparation, which will replace TeX and its derivatives, but I also don't see anything like that on the horizon. The biggest drawbacks of TeX are lack of proper Unicode support; lack of support of modern font formats; and outdated programming practices. Tools like XeTeX, LuaTeX and ConTeXt tackle these problems with some success, but they are still not perfect. Also, they are too similar to TeX to bring drastic changes to programmers. We need something that is designed from zero specifically as a TeX replacement (including compiler, package manager, popular packages, bibliography manager, converters, etc...). I can only hope for better future... BTW, fun fact: TeX is still actively developed. Knuth fixed some bugs in the kernel last month (after few years of pause).
- spekcular 6y ago
  When I'm OK with the defaults, LaTeX is a breeze. When I want to change something nontrivial about the formatting or style, it's a nightmare. For example, there are zero mature fonts besides the default computer modern that also have math rendering that's aesthetically acceptable to me. And I forget the details, but typesetting is handled in such a way that the kerning around things like hyphens is broken. I've fixed it manually before in places where it was particularly egregious. Also on this point: an ungodly number of hours are wasted every year by academics figuring out how to contort LaTeX so the resulting document complies with NSF grant specifications, which you must meet or be auto-rejected. In particular, NSF requires one-inch margins, but there's no way to force the typesetting engine to strictly respect the margins you set. So at the end you're left to turn the visual margin guides on and check there are no margin overruns, or you risk getting your proposal set to the trash (theoretically, at least). I've also heard that LaTeX editors are development disasters with a bus factor of one. The NSF really ought to fund them, because if we wake up one day after the maintainers of all the popular editors die and Apple/Microsoft force an operating system update that breaks compatibility, paper writing in the physical sciences will grind to a halt.
  - leephillips 6y ago
yunesj 6y ago
When writing my dissertation, latex decided that aesthetics require it to omit one of my paragraphs. It’s one of those things that is not so funny near a deadline :-) Of course, it was some sort of user error.
- hatmatrix 6y ago
  On the other hand, try finding and realigning a figure that MS Word replaced when you made a small change to it.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  What kind of error? I would never imagine a bug like that would be possible in latex. In fact I’ve never encountered any bug IIRC. But sometimes latex is just weird. But he. Good thing is no one reads thesis in full anyway
leetrout 6y ago
From the first lesson: Take for example the element <h2> indicating a new section in an HTML document. LaTeX also has a command for this; here one would use the \section command. —— I feel like that’s making a very broad assumption about people writing semantic markup in HTML. H{1-6} is for a header. It has nothing to do with a section (<section> or otherwise).
- leephillips 6y ago
  I thought that’s exactly what headers are for. Otherwise, why would someone use them? Just for something to attach a style to, or because the default styling looks sort of like what you want?
  - viraptor 6y ago
    In practice? SEO. Google cares about H1 and H2 and will use them to list sections in results.
  - leetrout 6y ago
    Correct — someone would use them for a large, bold font. I’m not saying they are wrong just that a ton of HTML is abused.
    - dhosek 6y ago
      People abuse LaTeX in similar ways. Not to mention that there are some awful examples in Lamport's book. I've dug up my 75% complete LaTeX book that I wrote while I was teaching LaTeX classes for TUG and I'm going to try to finish it in the next couple of months. I think a big part of what will make the book good is as much what's being left out as what's being included.
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      That's not entirely correct. HTML allows heading elements (<h1>-<h6>) wherever "flow content" is expected, but not in eg. "phrasing content", and also not in a number of content models allowing flow content generally but not heading elements specifically such as those for the <address>, <dt>, <th>, and <legend> elements. What that means is that eg. a <h2> element automatically ends an open <p> element when not closed explicitly. WHATWG's HTML spec clumsily expresses these SGML tag inference rules by enumerating explicitly all elements that end <p> elements (and of course, WHATWG's HTML specification process, as would be expected, then "forgets" to update the enumeration when new elements are introduced in later specs): > A p element's end tag may be omitted if the p element is immediately followed by an address, article, aside, blockquote, details, div, dl, fieldset, figcaption, figure, footer, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, header, hr, main, nav, ol, p, pre, section, table, or ul, element, or if there is no more content in the parent element and the parent element is an HTML element that is not an a, audio, del, ins, map, noscript, or video element Source: SGML DTD for W3C HTML 5.2 [1], prepared from W3C's HTML 5.2 spec, which in turn is derived from (an older version of) WHATWG's HTML spec. [1] http://sgmljs.net/docs/w3c-html52-dtd.html#element-categories http://sgmljs.net/docs/w3c-html52-dtd.html#element-categorie...
Koshkin 6y ago
I enjoy writing Plain TeX. I only wish there were a version of pdftex independent from the monstrously large modern TeX distributions...
- hanche 6y ago
  I haven't tried it myself, but here is an answer on tex.stackexchange.com regarding minimal TeXLive installations: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/397181 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/397181
vulcan01 6y ago
For all ye complaining about LaTeX being hard to use: use pandoc. Pandoc can convert your standard markdown/asciidoc file to many different formats. And, you can embed LaTeX inside, giving you both flexibility and ease of use. https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org
- dceddia 6y ago
  Yep, pandoc is great! I used it to write a technical book. I wrote the text in standard markdown and used pandoc to convert to PDF and ePub, with MOBI handled separately (by Calibre). That plus a handful of ruby scripts to do some markdown transformations worked out pretty well.
  - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
    Pandoc is A.MA.ZING. Can’t believe I didn’t know about this for so long.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Org-mode can also be exported directly to LaTeX amongst other things. I like pandoc for the times I must deliver a word doc, but org-mode is superior for LaTeX.
  - hatmatrix 6y ago
    If you're using emacs, might as well use AUCTeX - if you're writing for LaTeX, it has all the keybindings and you skip and extra export step. With org-mode you have to keep using narrow-to-region to get all the syntax highlighting and keybindings for complex expressions. Having said that, org-mode/org-babel is useful when writing for both HTML and LaTeX export.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      I wrote my PhD thesis using AucTeX and if an org-mode document evolves to something that is definitely going to typeset then I'll convert to tex one last time and switch to AucTeX. Org-mode is great for starting random documents with no specific publication target. I might end up typesetting it, or maybe turn it into a web page/static site, or might just leave it as text for my own benefit.
xvilka 6y ago
I hope the Tectonic[1] and it's oxidized (completely reimplemented in Rust) fork[2][3] will take off. [1] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ [2] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/tree/oxidize https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/tree/oxidize [3] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459
- lwhsiao 6y ago
  I've already switched to tectonic to build my documents by default (rather than latexmk) and have really enjoyed it.
  - diarrhea 6y ago
    What makes it better than latexmk? I use the latter extensively and am quite happy with it. The listed advantages of Tectonic are somewhat debatable: > Tectonic automatically downloads support files I use a full TeXLive distribution in a Docker image. But this is a clear advantage on regular desktop setups, although I'd argue most people don't notice that texlive is 4GB+. MiKTeX does downloading on-the-fly, too. > Tectonic has sophisticated logic and automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed Latexmk does this too. BibTeX is outdated (use biblatex+biber), I hope Tectonic is not hardwired to it. > doesn’t write TeX’s intermediate files Sounds terrible! For a long document I maintain, a cold run takes 8 minutes. A "cached" run (all auxiliary files present and somewhat up to date), it's below 3 minutes. It only says this is the default setting, but it would be a devastating default in my case. > The tectonic command-line program is quiet and never stops to ask for input. Okay that sounds nice, but I've used the interactive "can't write to file X.pdf" many times before, when the PDF to write to was locked for writing (open in PDF viewer). It saves aborting the entire run and starting fresh. > Thanks to the power of XeTeX, Tectonic can use modern OpenType fonts and is fully Unicode-enabled. Nice, but is this Tectonic-specific? I use latexmk with lualatex. The latter is better than xelatex (microtype, contour, memeory management, lua integration, ...). If Tectonic is hard-wired to xetex and doesn't allow lualatex, this is a big downside. The remaining points are nice, especially the GitHub actions stuff. Though I just use the same Docker image there that I use for local development.
veltas 6y ago
For people interested in learning LaTeX, I learned LaTeX from this PDF well enough to do my reports and understand search results about LaTeX: https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

Not many really talking about the linked resource here but it looks quite beautiful (especially the font). Short for what it is, but could be useful to beginners. I find Overleaf pages also to provide good resources on LaTeX.

alanbernstein 6y ago

I've used latex on and off over the years, I can write complicated math expressions off the top of my head pretty easily. For document formatting and package use, however, I need to look up syntax and examples every time. Where can I learn the how all the messy syntax of latex (aside from the math notation itself) is supposed to work? Or should I just stop trying, because it's a lovecraftian tangle that will drive me insane?

tffgg 6y ago

I know it's unrealistic, but I wish someone would reinvent Latex. I don't really want anyone to learn it. It's sad it seems kind of the best tools for advanced use out there...

nsajko 6y ago
The reinvention is called ConTeXt.
flenserboy 6y ago
It's not difficult to learn at a base level. The real difficulty in learning LaTeX is becoming comfortable with handing the keys over when it comes to presentation — WYSIWYG grabs people easily, and, once taken in, it is tremendously difficult to break them of their urge to fiddle with things. In many ways it is good that it takes some doing to do more than the basics — nice output for basic documents is almost a guarantee.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  I second that. I was able to re-write my CV which was in Word to LaTeX in about 3 hours with help of online resources (no prior LaTeX experience). The output is high-quality, consistent and looks professional. I didn't get into a lot of advanced stuff - just defined a few "newcolumntype"/"newcommand" and used them everywhere but that freed me from formatting worries and let me focus on the content.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  On the other hand less common features are often so difficult to learn. For me the worst is tikz. I know it’s not exactly latex. But I wished it was easier to use. The output is so good, but it’s so damn hard to learn.
  - tombert 6y ago
    Tikz was so frustrating that I ended up drawing my stuff in an SVG editor and importing a high-resolution export from there. I know it's not as cool or scalable as a proper Tikz diagram, but if you have any value on your time, then I just do not think that Tikz gives you enough to be worth it, at least for relatively simple drawings.
  - diffeomorphism 6y ago
    Having something like ktikz (or qtikz) helps: https://github.com/fhackenberger/ktikz https://github.com/fhackenberger/ktikz However, it is not quite as helpful as latexdraw was for pstricks. That said, I am not sure how much of that difficulty is due to tools lacking and how much is due to "describe vector graphics as code" being a hard problem.
  - hanche 6y ago
    What – you did not enjoy reading the 1200+ page manual? But yes, I know what you mean. I use the cargo cult method for writing TikZ code myself. Look for examples of people doing something similar, then poke at the code until it does what I want. I am slowly developing some glimmer of understanding, though. I figure in another 100 years' time, I'll be a TikZ wizard at this rate.
chungy 6y ago
LyX is an excellent WYSIWYM GUI for it.
- xorcist 6y ago
  This should probably be the first option for anyone who wants to produce a LaTeX document without learning the language, for some reason. It has support for bibtex, drawings, and equations.
coliveira 6y ago
Reinventing LaTeX can be done. The huge problem is to reinvent the ecosystem of packages. This would take several years, if not decades.
GiovanniP 6y ago
Take a look at TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org http://www.texmacs.org) (does not share code with TeX, only the name recalls it!). It is at the same time structured and WYSIWYG (having accessible text source), completely programmable (user-defined native macros and Scheme) and has a high quality typography (includes a global page-breaking algorithm). There is a helpful mailing list (info at http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/ml.en.html http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/ml.en.html) and a forum (http://forum.texmacs.cn/ http://forum.texmacs.cn/).
- xvilka 6y ago
  Problem with TeXmacs that they stuck with the old technology too - they use[1] ancient Guile and that prevents them to use JIT and in turn prevents[2] distributions to update Guile itself. [1] https://github.com/texmacs/devel/issues/9 https://github.com/texmacs/devel/issues/9 [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1828124 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1828124
  - GiovanniP 6y ago
    I agree that some communication from the TeXmacs developers to the Fedora ones would be helpful (I documented myself, Fedora is using Guile 2 and still supporting 1.8 with a compatibility package). (More about the Scheme in TeXmacs later). Said this, I think the angle from which you are looking at the software is too narrow. A better angle is to look at the realized potential of the TeXmacs document preparation system: it does everything one could wish for. With "everything" I am exaggerating a little :-) More in detail (I refer to [1] for a complete discussion): 1) It makes structured editing possible (and that is its main mode of operation). So if you want to mark your text with "semantic" markup you can do that, and in fact that is what using the software leads you to do. 2) It is controllable via programs 3) It has advanced typography (including mathematical formulae at the necessary level for professional mathematicians, as far as I can see), and it is pleasant and easy to work with: you can concentrate on writing, letting the program take care of the visual appearance and you do not need to interpret the sources while you are editing, to figure out where is the text that you want to edit 4) It has user-definable keyboard shortcuts that further help entering structured text ... and I feel it is enough for a short list of the features. Back to Scheme. The development team is debating on which Scheme to use for the future of TeXmacs, and the debate is taking time. Here are some experiments [2],[3]. The current software (with Guile 1.8) works smoothly, with full functionality. For Linux installation, I chose the static binary they provide ... because on Ubuntu I don't have Guile 1.8 ;-) [1] http://cahiers.gutenberg.eu.org/cg-bin/article/CG_2001___39-40_39_0.pdf http://cahiers.gutenberg.eu.org/cg-bin/article/CG_2001___39-... [2] https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3 https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3 [3] https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/s7 https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/s7
naringas 6y ago
there was a project but it seems abandoned https://github.com/patoline/patoline https://github.com/patoline/patoline

nsajko 6y ago

Fun fact: about 20 years ago, LaTeX developers were lamenting the stagnation of LaTeX and LaTeX being surpassed on a technical level by its new competitor (in the TeX world), ConTeXt. Since then LaTeX has basically kept on stagnating in the name of backwards compatibility, while ConTeXt keeps on progressing; it already broke backwards compatibility several times (it's latest implementation is called LMTX). But the inertia is so powerful that nobody except TeX geeks even knows what ConTeXt is. How does that happen? Sidenote: it's not just about ConTeXt, even LuaTeX, the latest (but not new anymore) implementation of TeX in general, is being ignored by scientific publishers. Meanwhile, ConTeXt is mostly used for demanding typesetting of books. And, BTW, using ConTeXt (or LuaTeX) doesn't even necessarily mean writing TeX anymore, it's possible to drive the engines through the Lua C API, or with XML, etc. ConTeXt links: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt Mailing list: https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context

auggierose 6y ago
Who is writing LaTeX? Mathematicians. They don't really care about the technical level of its implementation, and they surely don't care that you "don't necessarily write TeX anymore", actually, that's a negative for them.
- nsajko 6y ago
  Scientists use TeX for writing papers that they can submit to journals. As I already said, the journals don't accept ConTeXt. So of course mathematicians will rarely use ConTeXt. > care about the technical level of its implementation It's not about the implementation, it's about the interface.
  - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
    Some journals accept Tex files? I’m surprised. SIAM (applied math) does not for instance. I don’t think IEEE does. Do Math journal accept tex files directly? Arxiv does of course, most notably. But it’s not a journal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brian_herman 6y ago

I used this in school it is great!

Hydraulix989 6y ago

Why do the lessons only have code but not the rendered results? It's difficult to follow along if you don't know what the code is actually doing...

codetrotter 6y ago
Press the “LaTeX online” button under a code snippet to see the rendered result. PS: Do you have JS enabled?

ubavic 6y ago

I use some form of TeX (LaTeX or XeTeX) almost daily, and I often think about the future of (La)TeX and potential replacements. I think that we desperately need some modern language for document preparation, which will replace TeX and its derivatives, but I also don't see anything like that on the horizon. The biggest drawbacks of TeX are lack of proper Unicode support; lack of support of modern font formats; and outdated programming practices. Tools like XeTeX, LuaTeX and ConTeXt tackle these problems with some success, but they are still not perfect. Also, they are too similar to TeX to bring drastic changes to programmers. We need something that is designed from zero specifically as a TeX replacement (including compiler, package manager, popular packages, bibliography manager, converters, etc...). I can only hope for better future... BTW, fun fact: TeX is still actively developed. Knuth fixed some bugs in the kernel last month (after few years of pause).

spekcular 6y ago
When I'm OK with the defaults, LaTeX is a breeze. When I want to change something nontrivial about the formatting or style, it's a nightmare. For example, there are zero mature fonts besides the default computer modern that also have math rendering that's aesthetically acceptable to me. And I forget the details, but typesetting is handled in such a way that the kerning around things like hyphens is broken. I've fixed it manually before in places where it was particularly egregious. Also on this point: an ungodly number of hours are wasted every year by academics figuring out how to contort LaTeX so the resulting document complies with NSF grant specifications, which you must meet or be auto-rejected. In particular, NSF requires one-inch margins, but there's no way to force the typesetting engine to strictly respect the margins you set. So at the end you're left to turn the visual margin guides on and check there are no margin overruns, or you risk getting your proposal set to the trash (theoretically, at least). I've also heard that LaTeX editors are development disasters with a bus factor of one. The NSF really ought to fund them, because if we wake up one day after the maintainers of all the popular editors die and Apple/Microsoft force an operating system update that breaks compatibility, paper writing in the physical sciences will grind to a halt.
- leephillips 6y ago

yunesj 6y ago

When writing my dissertation, latex decided that aesthetics require it to omit one of my paragraphs. It’s one of those things that is not so funny near a deadline :-) Of course, it was some sort of user error.

hatmatrix 6y ago
On the other hand, try finding and realigning a figure that MS Word replaced when you made a small change to it.
the_svd_doctor 6y ago
What kind of error? I would never imagine a bug like that would be possible in latex. In fact I’ve never encountered any bug IIRC. But sometimes latex is just weird. But he. Good thing is no one reads thesis in full anyway

leetrout 6y ago

From the first lesson: Take for example the element <h2> indicating a new section in an HTML document. LaTeX also has a command for this; here one would use the \section command. —— I feel like that’s making a very broad assumption about people writing semantic markup in HTML. H{1-6} is for a header. It has nothing to do with a section (<section> or otherwise).

leephillips 6y ago
I thought that’s exactly what headers are for. Otherwise, why would someone use them? Just for something to attach a style to, or because the default styling looks sort of like what you want?
- viraptor 6y ago
  In practice? SEO. Google cares about H1 and H2 and will use them to list sections in results.
- leetrout 6y ago
  Correct — someone would use them for a large, bold font. I’m not saying they are wrong just that a ton of HTML is abused.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    People abuse LaTeX in similar ways. Not to mention that there are some awful examples in Lamport's book. I've dug up my 75% complete LaTeX book that I wrote while I was teaching LaTeX classes for TUG and I'm going to try to finish it in the next couple of months. I think a big part of what will make the book good is as much what's being left out as what's being included.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    That's not entirely correct. HTML allows heading elements (<h1>-<h6>) wherever "flow content" is expected, but not in eg. "phrasing content", and also not in a number of content models allowing flow content generally but not heading elements specifically such as those for the <address>, <dt>, <th>, and <legend> elements. What that means is that eg. a <h2> element automatically ends an open <p> element when not closed explicitly. WHATWG's HTML spec clumsily expresses these SGML tag inference rules by enumerating explicitly all elements that end <p> elements (and of course, WHATWG's HTML specification process, as would be expected, then "forgets" to update the enumeration when new elements are introduced in later specs): > A p element's end tag may be omitted if the p element is immediately followed by an address, article, aside, blockquote, details, div, dl, fieldset, figcaption, figure, footer, form, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, header, hr, main, nav, ol, p, pre, section, table, or ul, element, or if there is no more content in the parent element and the parent element is an HTML element that is not an a, audio, del, ins, map, noscript, or video element Source: SGML DTD for W3C HTML 5.2 [1], prepared from W3C's HTML 5.2 spec, which in turn is derived from (an older version of) WHATWG's HTML spec. [1] http://sgmljs.net/docs/w3c-html52-dtd.html#element-categories http://sgmljs.net/docs/w3c-html52-dtd.html#element-categorie...

Koshkin 6y ago

I enjoy writing Plain TeX. I only wish there were a version of pdftex independent from the monstrously large modern TeX distributions...

hanche 6y ago
I haven't tried it myself, but here is an answer on tex.stackexchange.com regarding minimal TeXLive installations: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/397181 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/397181

vulcan01 6y ago

For all ye complaining about LaTeX being hard to use: use pandoc. Pandoc can convert your standard markdown/asciidoc file to many different formats. And, you can embed LaTeX inside, giving you both flexibility and ease of use. https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org

dceddia 6y ago
Yep, pandoc is great! I used it to write a technical book. I wrote the text in standard markdown and used pandoc to convert to PDF and ePub, with MOBI handled separately (by Calibre). That plus a handful of ruby scripts to do some markdown transformations worked out pretty well.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  Pandoc is A.MA.ZING. Can’t believe I didn’t know about this for so long.
globular-toast 6y ago
Org-mode can also be exported directly to LaTeX amongst other things. I like pandoc for the times I must deliver a word doc, but org-mode is superior for LaTeX.
- hatmatrix 6y ago
  If you're using emacs, might as well use AUCTeX - if you're writing for LaTeX, it has all the keybindings and you skip and extra export step. With org-mode you have to keep using narrow-to-region to get all the syntax highlighting and keybindings for complex expressions. Having said that, org-mode/org-babel is useful when writing for both HTML and LaTeX export.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    I wrote my PhD thesis using AucTeX and if an org-mode document evolves to something that is definitely going to typeset then I'll convert to tex one last time and switch to AucTeX. Org-mode is great for starting random documents with no specific publication target. I might end up typesetting it, or maybe turn it into a web page/static site, or might just leave it as text for my own benefit.

xvilka 6y ago

I hope the Tectonic[1] and it's oxidized (completely reimplemented in Rust) fork[2][3] will take off. [1] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ [2] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/tree/oxidize https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/tree/oxidize [3] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459

lwhsiao 6y ago
I've already switched to tectonic to build my documents by default (rather than latexmk) and have really enjoyed it.
- diarrhea 6y ago
  What makes it better than latexmk? I use the latter extensively and am quite happy with it. The listed advantages of Tectonic are somewhat debatable: > Tectonic automatically downloads support files I use a full TeXLive distribution in a Docker image. But this is a clear advantage on regular desktop setups, although I'd argue most people don't notice that texlive is 4GB+. MiKTeX does downloading on-the-fly, too. > Tectonic has sophisticated logic and automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed Latexmk does this too. BibTeX is outdated (use biblatex+biber), I hope Tectonic is not hardwired to it. > doesn’t write TeX’s intermediate files Sounds terrible! For a long document I maintain, a cold run takes 8 minutes. A "cached" run (all auxiliary files present and somewhat up to date), it's below 3 minutes. It only says this is the default setting, but it would be a devastating default in my case. > The tectonic command-line program is quiet and never stops to ask for input. Okay that sounds nice, but I've used the interactive "can't write to file X.pdf" many times before, when the PDF to write to was locked for writing (open in PDF viewer). It saves aborting the entire run and starting fresh. > Thanks to the power of XeTeX, Tectonic can use modern OpenType fonts and is fully Unicode-enabled. Nice, but is this Tectonic-specific? I use latexmk with lualatex. The latter is better than xelatex (microtype, contour, memeory management, lua integration, ...). If Tectonic is hard-wired to xetex and doesn't allow lualatex, this is a big downside. The remaining points are nice, especially the GitHub actions stuff. Though I just use the same Docker image there that I use for local development.

veltas 6y ago

For people interested in learning LaTeX, I learned LaTeX from this PDF well enough to do my reports and understand search results about LaTeX: https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf